


One Out of Three

by faeleverte



Series: One for Three Verse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Cas-centric, Gen, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 16:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4927396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faeleverte/pseuds/faeleverte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel Novak's life has crumbled all around him. Feeling alone and bereft, he boards a plane back to Kansas, to a place that hasn't been home in fifteen years. He can't admit what he's searching for, but he's sure he'll know it when he sees it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Out of Three

**Author's Note:**

> But in the stillness of the moment it takes for a Polaroid picture  
> To capture our faces forever  
> The world has turned a touch on it's axis  
> And the only thing certain  
> Is everything changes
> 
> – Polaroid Picture, Frank Turner

Cas fidgeted with the end of his tie as the plane taxied toward the terminal, still trying to figure out exactly what he thought he was doing there. The urge to go home made sense, for a limited quantity of “sense,” he supposed, but Lawrence hadn’t been home for more than a decade. He’d moved away three months after graduation, flying to New York City with all his worldly possessions squashed into a single dufflebag, and he hadn’t been back since. A year after he’d left, his younger sister had graduated and flown off toward her own life, setting himself up in California. Two months after _that_ , their father had packed up the house, sold most of his belongings, and gone on a “life sabbatical.” Whatever the hell that was. All Cas knew for certain about it was that his dad had begun in India thirteen years before and somehow hadn’t gotten around to finding his way back to the US.

The plane finally arrived at the gate, and Cas’s tension ratcheted higher as he rose to collect his bags from the overhead bins. His life provided luxuries like first class seats, meaning that he could be among the first to deplane. Really though, first class seats were about the only thing _good_ left that his life did provide; everything else nice in his world had been taken away, ripped from his limp-fisted metaphorical hands with the thump of a judge’s gavel. Cas edged up the aisle, trying to put that thought away, just for a few minutes, just long enough to collect his bag and rent a car for the hour-long drive from Kansas City to the place where he vaguely remembered being happy.

And, of course, because he was trying to “hold on for a just a few minutes,” it only took him two and a half hours to track down his suitcase, still at the airport in New York City. Renting a car took another hour, since the agency had lost his reservation. He had the foresight to call ahead to check his hotel booking in Lawrence, however, and that, at least, seemed to have gone off without a hitch.

Another day in the life of Castiel James Novak, one for three in everything he did.

*****

The room he’d chosen was as nice as it appeared on the website: separate sitting room with a television that reminded him of a movie theater screen in the sheer size of it; massive bed in a well-separated room, headboard lined with fluffy pillows; vanity as big as his kitchen counter at home; walk-in shower, and a whirlpool tub that nearly begged to hold two. Of course, Cas didn’t have a second person with whom to bathe; he’d given that part up when he couldn’t overcome his father’s workaholic genes. So Cas focused on the giant television and the bed on which he could sprawl and pretended to be perfectly pleased by the accommodations. 

If only he had something to change into…

Clearly, shopping would have to move to the top spot on his to-do list. Not that he had a list. Or any idea of what he _should_ be doing. 

He took the toiletries bag out of his carry-on and set it carefully on one edge of the double vanity. After looking at it for a moment, he grabbed it and moved it to the precise center of the unending stretch of marble. And then, after another moment, he opened the bag and spread the contents around, razor at one end, toothbrush at the other, hair gel and shaving cream, an optimistically full bottle of lube all arranged haphazardly between them. 

It still looked empty, lonely, but he gave it up as hopeless and went in the other room to fish out his laptop. Ignoring two emails from his least-favorite coworker eased his temper a bit, and he pulled up Google to find a location for the shopping he would require to get him through until his suitcase caught up to him. The results ranged from depressing ( _trendy apparel_ had never described his wardrobe) to useless (why _were_ there so many women’s clothing stores in such a concentrated area?), and he finally accepted his fate and grabbed his keycard, wallet, and phone to head down the block to a nearby Gap. 

Over an hour later, he stumbled back into his room with three pairs of pants, two in navy twill and one pair of jeans that the sales associate had stared at in open-mouthed astonishment that Cas _hoped_ meant they were attractive on him and not that they were _un_ attractive on him. He also had two oxford shirts, one blue and one white, a blue plaid flannel shirt, two long-sleeved t-shirts, and one graphic tee with a classic Chevy on the front. He refused to examine his reasons for giving in to the urge to buy the last one. He’d been talked into a shawl-collared cardigan in a bright blue, and then he’d stumbled out to freedom, made it halfway up the block, and had to turn around to go back.

His second trip netted him enough underwear and socks to last a week, two pairs of sleep pants, a package of plain white t-shirts in which to sleep, a knitted beanie, a plain black belt, and a ridiculous pair of slip-on sneakers. Running would have to wait to resume until his suitcase found him or he found a store that sold real shoes. He’d also made the mistake of glancing toward the back of the store, and, hidden deeply in the bottom of one bag, a purple girl’s shirt with an oddly dressed duck on the front was weighing down his walk back to the hotel. He would just have to shove it in the bottom of his carry-on for now and pretend it didn’t hurt him to look at.

*****

He slid into the hotel restaurant just barely in time to make the lunch service and asked the server what would be easiest for the kitchen staff to prepare. He’d worked in enough food establishments during his college years to have a deep appreciation for an easy table and a perfectly rational hatred of people who slid in moments before closing time. There were probably many other _trendy_ eating establishments within a reasonable distance, but Cas was tired. Too tired to walk any further. Nearly too tired to eat. 

As it turned out, the sandwich he’d ordered had ended up with half of it in a box, carried up to his room with his dessert and his bags and bags of clothing, and the glum little emotional raincloud that he’d begun to think would always hang over his head. 

Once he made it safely behind the locked door, Cas pushed the plantation shutters closed, pulled the tags off of a pair of his new pajama pants (only _slightly_ ripping the seam in the process), and crawled between the crisp white linens on the bed. If he woke up in time for supper, great. If he didn’t, sleeping through until morning, even better. 

He let himself think about the real reason he’d flown halfway across the country to a town he hadn’t seen in fifteen years, but he found he wasn’t ready to admit it yet. Not even to himself. Instead, he pulled the covers more tightly about his neck and snuggled into one of the pillows. After a few minutes of restless shifting, he grabbed the other pillow to hug it close, filling up some of the emptiness of the vast space under the covers, and then he sighed tiredly, closed his eyes, and didn’t so much _drift_ to sleep as faceplant into the arms of Morpheus.

*****

Three days later, Cas still hadn’t made it out of the hotel. In spite of being parked in the center of the “historic” part of the city, everything outside the window still looked so different from how he remembered it. Whatever _home_ he’d hoped to find didn’t seem likely to appear in this place he used to live. He climbed slowly up the stairs to his room after breakfast, pulling his still-unused cellphone out of his carry-on bag, digging until he found his charger to plug it in. Then he peeled off his shirt and pants and climbed back into bed. The phone hitting a full charge and turning on and the subsequent arrival of approximately three million messages would wake him up easily enough.

It was suppertime before Cas opened his eyes again.

On the nightstand, the blue light in the corner of his screen blinked steadily, accusingly flickering in a way that seemed like a warning. Cas groaned and rolled toward it, scrubbing his fingers through his hair as he reached for it with the other hand. Sixty-seven texts, 99+ new emails, and the state of his Hangouts notifications didn’t bear thinking about. Cas cleared his notifications without reading anything and sat up. He refused to check his missed calls or voicemail on principle, knowing that the one voice he _wanted_ to hear would not be among the increasingly frantic messages left by coworkers. His daughter was in Cozumel, a young, energetic third-wheel to her mother’s honeymoon. With Claire out of the country, there was no one else to call and see if Cas was doing okay.

The depressing thought that Cas didn’t _have_ any friends to leave messages intruded, and he rolled out of bed to find pants in order to have something to focus on _other_ than his desperately lonely personal life. If he’d been asked just one short year before, Cas would have replied that of _course_ he had friends, he had a number of friends. Places to be over the weekend, people to meet for dinner and a show. Friends. Apparently he’d lost them all in the divorce. 

Or perhaps he’d never had them in the first place.

Maybe they’d always been Amelia’s friends. That would make sense, actually, since Cas had never been good at making friends of his own. Every friend he’d ever had growing up he’d acquired through his younger sister, Anna or his cousin, Gabriel. All of them save one, of course, and Cas would never be able to understand how he’d managed that one friendship that had always meant that little bit _more_.

Dean Winchester had been the answer to every wish ever made by the lonely little boy Cas had become the summer he turned nine. New to Lawrence, feeling abandoned by his mother, no matter how his father had promised that the fault for the divorce was his and not Castiel’s, Dean’s friendly, freckled face and easy acceptance had been _everything_. There had been sleepovers in the treehouse that snuggled in the branches of the enormous oak near the back of Dean’s yard, tv movies on the slightly-stained shag carpet of the Winchester family room, ice cream and pie after sandwiches at Mary Winchester’s scarred kitchen table, Fourth of July fireworks watched from the roof of Cas’s house, and pillow forts in Dean’s room on rainy days. 

They’d built up a closeness between them under the scorching heat of that summer sun, when Dean had played pranks on his mother and teased his baby brother into smiles. Cas had looked on and soaked up the familial warmth in a second-hand way, since his own family had never been so close. Their friendship had been cemented in quiet confessions in the dark of night, hours after Mary had told them both to “hush up and get right to sleep, boys.” Cas had whispered about his mother and the way he alternately longed for her and hated her; Dean had replied with his long-hidden dreams of being a rock star or a superhero, someone the world would see and know and love. For the first time in his life, Castiel learned how lonely he’d always been and what it was like to lose that horrible emptiness. All the spaces in his heart that had shriveled or never grown filled up and blossomed under the affection that Dean offered so easily, asking nothing more than the same in return.

School began in August, Dean and Cas had walked down the street to the low brick building of their elementary each morning, Anna trailing along behind, whining at them to slow down for shorter legs. Cas had expected to hate it there, as he had at every school before, but Dean’s acceptance of him brought Cas other friends. His cousin, Gabriel was in their grade, and his antics kept him in trouble so much that Cas could join in most of Dean’s escapades with no fear of repercussion. When they did get caught– liberating the hamster or borrowing a snack from the tall cabinet in the corner of their fourth grade room– the teacher tended to be lenient, knowing from Gabriel-induced experience how much worse it could actually have been. At least Cas never set anything on fire, accidentally or otherwise. 

That Halloween had come with Cas’s first trick-or-treat experience, dressed as Superman to Dean’s Batman. Both of their costumes included capes that Mary’s own hands had sewn. That fact would become so much more important two short days later. Dean and Cas had gorged themselves on candy until their stomachs hurt, bouncing around the living room at Dean’s house until his father, John, had come down the stairs to tell them both to “find a place to park and stay there for a while.” After that, Dean had graciously shared his Star Wars comforter with Cas on the living room floor, until they’d fallen asleep, curled together like a pair of happy, overfilled puppies. The next morning, when Cas ran for home with his cape still tied over a pair of pajamas borrowed from Dean, Mary had kissed his cheek and thanked him for being such a good friend to her son. 

It was the last time Cas would ever see her.

In the small hours of the morning on November the second, Cas had woken to flashing lights, blaring sirens, and the frantic screams of his best friend in the world. He’d raced by his father’s clutching hands to get out the front door, red cape flapping behind him as he’d run across his yard to where Dean knelt in the grass, his own black cape draping around him like a shroud as he’d clutched something small to his chest, shouting out his grief and fear. Cas had dropped down beside him, curling around to wrap his arms tightly around Dean’s shoulders, finally getting a good look at what Dean held. 

Sammy, Dean’s baby brother, Mary’s youngest child, lay in Dean’s arms, face screwed up as he stared up at Dean with the wondering trust that Cas would later learn only an infant could manage. Cas had tugged them both more tightly against his body, praying to a god he didn’t believe in that everything would magically be okay. John found them there, several hours later, damp from the spray of the hoses, sooty, and utterly dry-eyed. He’d collected Sam from Dean’s arms and pulled Dean away from Cas’s embrace without a word. As they’d walked away, Dean had looked back once, catching Cas’s eye and mouthing “thank you.” 

The next two weeks at school had been hell without Dean by his side, and when he finally did return, he’d been a quieter, grey-faced version of the sunny, freckled boy Cas loved with all his heart. Looking at Dean, at the grief and anger that pinched his brows and darkened his eyes, Cas finally understood what love really meant. He loved Dean Winchester, and he would have done anything to take away his suffering. Lacking the language to say all of that, Cas had turned to Dean at lunch that first day and said, “I really liked her hair. It reminded me of yours.”

Dean’s face has screwed up tightly, as if he was going to cry, and then he sighed heavily, tension falling out of his shoulders.

“Thanks, Cas.” Dean had finally said. “Wanna swing?”

They didn’t talk about Mary again for many years, not at the funeral when Dean whispered to Cas that he wished they could sit together, not when the construction on the Winchester home was completed and John moved back in with his boys, not even on Dean’s birthday in January, when John forgot about it and Cas and Anna burned a cake in a desperate attempt to make up for him. Not until high school, sophomore year, the first time Cas and Dean went to a party together and drank far too much, did Cas bring her up. 

“You’re as beautiful as she was,” Cas had said solemnly, reaching out one finger to trace a constellation in the freckles on Dean’s nose. 

“You’re as beautiful as your face,” Dean had answered sarcastically, slapping Cas’s hand away. 

“That made no sense, Dean.” 

“Shut up and go to sleep, Cas.”

And they had both slept after that, curled together on the double bed in Dean’s room, the way they did every Friday night, spending Saturday’s sprawled out side by side in Cas’s big queen-size. The next weekend, Dean got his first girlfriend, and the nights spent together became more sporadic after that. They hadn’t _ended_ their weird, codependent friendship until after graduation, however, when Cas had regretfully sold or donated everything he couldn’t fit in his bag for the move halfway across the country. 

Their contact had faded following his relocation, days and then weeks fitting into the spaces between their phone calls. Months of no talking began to filter in, and then phone calls only happened on birthdays and holidays. During those calls, they’d only reminisced, never mentioning anything terribly important, not talking about what was currently going on much at all. And then Cas met Amelia, and Dean had Lisa, and the friendship that had once been the bedrock for Cas’s whole identity had just...vanished. 

Cas came back to himself to find he’d curled into the squeaky leather of the loveseat in the seating area of his hotel room, his phone squeezed so tightly in his hand that the edges had left dents in each of his fingers. He carefully unfolded his hand, letting his phone drop to his lap, and then he forced his legs out straight, consciously relaxing back into the cushions and closing his eyes.

_Dean Winchester_

Thinking the name came more easily after Cas’s little trip down memory lane, and he quickly pushed himself upright, feeling a wave of determination he hadn’t felt since before Amelia had handed him a suitcase and politely asked for legal separation. It would be a longshot, Cas knew, for any of the Winchesters to be in the old house on Robintree, but Cas didn’t have anywhere _else_ to start looking. He grabbed a pair of the new navy pants out of a drawer, carrying them and a crisp-looking white oxford to the bathroom for fingernail clippers to remove the tags. 

Thirty minutes later, Cas climbed into his car at the valet stand. He didn’t bother turning on the GPS on his phone: the road ahead, _that one_ he remembered.

*****

Two blocks from the pair of houses that held all of Cas’s happy childhood memories, he pulled the car to the curb, braking jerkily as nerves washed over him. The thought of walking up to the front door and _hoping_ for it to be answered by John Winchester was so entirely foreign to Cas’s past experience that Cas wondered for a moment if he was hallucinating. Maybe he was still in his hotel room, dreaming. Maybe his plane had crashed, and this was his life flashing before his eyes.

After Mary’s death, Cas had started avoiding Dean’s father, nearly as much as Dean tried to avoid his father. John had gone hard with loss, drinking to numb his grief, shouting to relieve his angry guilt. Cas had never actually witnessed John striking either of his boys, but there had been a few times that Dean had shown up in the morning before school sporting bruises that he glibly explained away while trying to tug t-shirt sleeves lower and the neck higher in a futile attempt to hide them. When Cas pressed harder, Dean had all but bitten his head off, growling out a “Just leave it, Cas” or “None of your goddamned business, Cas.”

Cas had mentioned it to his father once, assuming he’d do something about it, report it to someone. Nothing ever came of it, however, and Cas finally had to admit, at least to himself, that Chuck had probably gotten wrapped up in the novel he’d been writing at the time and completely forgotten about Dean and Sam and John’s horrible temper. In his own naive efforts to help, Cas tried to make his own home as welcoming for Sam and Dean as possible, wrapping his little chosen family up as tightly as he could. The presence of a toddler who grew to a preschooler to a young boy created a deeper connection between Cas and Anna, both of them doting on the “baby” long after Sammy had become _Sam_ to the outside world, insisting that just because he was _the_ baby, that didn’t mean he was _a_ baby. 

Climbing out of his car to walk along the sidewalk that traced the opposite side of the street from the house where Cas had finished growing up, he had a weird sense of disorientation, of _home_. He’d been thinking of young Sam, with his roguish hazel eyes and his sweet smile, feeling the same feeling of longing as when he thought of Anna in California or Gabriel in Chicago. And thinking of Dean deepened that sense of _rightness_. Even the possibility of facing John Winchester had more the resignation of knowing he’d be expected to be nice to some older relative than actual dread. 

The road curved, and the sidewalk with it, and Cas froze as he came around the corner. First he saw his own house, the porchlight on showing that same horrible shade of pea-soup green paint, but not peeling; it must have been repainted at least once in the intervening years. He boggled that the owners hadn’t taken the opportunity to fix the color. And then, just beyond, he saw the Winchester family home, but he couldn’t see the color in the late evening gloom. The shutters looked about the same, however. Same wide porch where Cas spent many evenings talking and listening until he and Dean were both hoarse. Looking some more, greedily hungry to find everything he might remember, Cas’s breath snagged in his throat.

_Same ‘67 Chevy Impala in the driveway._

The hood was up and a denim-clad rear end waved around as the person in the engine growled and grunted, accompanied by the soft clink of a tool. The person wore a pair of heavy work boots, covered in grease, and a plaid flannel shirt rode up along their spine. Cas began to see spots, still unable to breathe, at the strange sense of deja vu that washed over him. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his eyes, but the image stayed the same.

How many times had he rounded that very same corner to that very same image? In the first years he’d lived in Lawrence, the person arched over the car had always been John, always dressed _just like that_. In later years, it had been Dean alone, sometimes, but more often with John at his side. How many times had Cas gone over to lean against the car with the two of them, their discussion full of unfamiliar terms that Cas hadn’t bothered to try to understand? How many times had he dug Dean out of the engine and slid into the passenger seat so the two of them could take the car out on the town for the night? 

Cas managed to suck in air before his knees buckled, and the sharp rasp in his throat alerted the mechanic to his presence. He lifted his head, the headlamp over his eyes piercing the darkness, temporarily blinding Cas.

“Um, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Cas began, cut off when the headlamp began moving toward him, slowly bobbing with the footsteps of the person beneath it.

“Cas?”

The voice was deeper than Cas had ever heard it, but he’d have recognized it anywhere, recognized the unbelieving note it held, recognized the warmth that buzzed around the sibilant. 

“Dean?” The word croaked out of Cas’s throat. “Is that…?”

The headlamp sped up, and Cas knew he’d be seeing spots for a long time after as it flared brighter and closer in his vision. Thick arms, thicker even than they’d been the last time they’d hugged, wrapped around Cas’s shoulders, dragging him against a chest that seemed half again as wide as memory described it.

“Cas!” Dean barked a laugh, stepping back and shining his light down Cas’s body before throwing back his head and dragging Cas in hard again. “Holy shit, it’s really you!”

“Yes,” Cas agreed, nodding with his face pressed tightly against Dean’s collarbone. He stood, revelling in the way it felt to have arms locked so tightly around his shoulders, to have a body pressed against his own. How long _had_ it been since he’d touched another person? Been touched _by_ another person? He remembered himself just as Dean’s arms began to loosen, finally managing to drag his hands away from his own sides to wrap them around Dean’s ribs, squeezing hard. “Yes, Dean. It is I.”

Dean’s arms gripped harder again, and Cas sighed blissfully. His own family hadn’t managed to build ties strong enough to hold them together, scattering to the far corners of the globe one by one, fond but distant in emotion and place. He hadn’t been strong enough to hold his wife and daughter to him, hiding inside his work and forgetting to be available, no matter how much he’d loved them. But here, wrapped tightly around Dean, Dean wrapped tightly around him, Cas suddenly felt a wave of hope that, just maybe, he had created at least _one_ bond that could never fade completely away. That somewhere in his life, he’d successfully collected some kind of familial relation that could withstand the passage of time.

Another day in the life of Castiel James Novak, and maybe one for three wasn’t so bad, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first adventure in this fandom, and I just couldn't resist the urge to play a bit with these characters. There's a sequel bopping around in my head, Dean's point of view on the reappearance of Cas. And then what happens after. Okay, so there's more than one sequel...
> 
> You can find me and my thoughts on writing, fandom, life, the universe, and everything over at [intentionally untitled](http://faeleverte.tumblr.com). My original fic mostly hangs out at [Penning Things](http://penningthings.tumblr.com).
> 
> Thanks for taking time to read!


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